Old Stories, New Stories about Mexican Immigrants

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Below is an Immigration Lawyer's letter to the Texas Observer. Plyler vs. Doe is a case in which the Supreme Court ruled that non-citizen children were eligible for public school education.

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August 10, 2007
THE NEXT GENERATION
The Texas Observer
by Ann Allott

I believe Plyler vs. Doe is the most important case ever issued in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court. (“A Lesson in Equal Protection,” July 13) Among other things, it recognized there was a shadow community in the U.S. and asked Congress to address that issue. No surprise, Congress is still deliberating the matter and cannot get up enough courage to vote for the Dream Act.

Reading your article, I remembered my own upbringing in the ’50s in rural Colorado. I attended public school as an Irish-German Catholic, daughter of a lawyer and nurse. I sat next to Esperanza for 8 years. She was from Mexico. Her house was near the river and had no plumbing or running water. One day she came to school with a big sore on her face. A rat had bitten her. She quit school at the end of her 8th year and went to work as a laborer in the canning factory.

Today, she is a Carmelite nun. During my high school years, the English teacher married the Mexican butcher who worked for the Safeway grocery store. She was fired.

Recently, I represented a “Mexican” who had been deported 3 times. He was in jail and wrote me to ask if I would represent him. His mother was born in Texas in 1921. She clearly was a U.S. citizen but she never attended school. “Mexican” women were not supposed to go to school then. I was able to prove her physical presence in the U.S. and my client was released from detention because he was “not an alien” -- he too was a U.S. citizen but never knew it.

Mexicans (Hispanics) have been the object of our prejudice for a long time. It is so difficult for Americans to see how prejudiced we are. We hated South Africa for not educating its blacks, but we do the same here. We send billions of dollars to Africa to save their children, while “illegals” receive no aid here. Now “illegals” are the scapegoat of the middle class.

What an irony it is that “illegals” just want the opportunity to have the basic living rights of our middle class. And our middle class is so unhappy they want to blame the “illegals” for their inability to accept the new global world.


http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2572